Real architectural gap found and fixed during Phase 2A testing, not part of
the original plan: scenario validate/answer requests proxied through
/lab/<token>/api/scenarios/:id/{validate,answer} were writing progress into
that ephemeral Lab container's own SQLite — which is destroyed on every
reset/reap. Confirmed by testing: solving a scenario never showed up on the
dashboard's curriculum view, and would have been silently lost on lab
recreate, directly contradicting "academic progress must survive lab
reset/recreate."
Root tension: scenario validation must run against the student's own live
cluster (only exists inside their Lab container) — it can't be re-run
anywhere else. But the canonical progress record needs to live on the
persistent identity instance, which never has the student's actual cluster
state applied to it.
Fix: this endpoint (POST /api/progress/record) records an outcome WITHOUT
re-running validation — it exists purely so the Gateway can relay a
validate/answer result it already obtained from the real Lab. The Gateway
forwards the real request to the Lab, returns that real response to the
browser unchanged, and separately calls this endpoint with the outcome. See
platform/gateway/src/server.js's relayScenarioOutcome().
Verified end-to-end: a scenario solved through a student's Lab shows up in
their curriculum immediately, survives their lab being destroyed and reset,
and is correctly attributed only to that student (not visible to a second
student's own curriculum view).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
Pre-Phase-1 platform work, approved and tested earlier but not yet committed:
- Terminal banner: "RootNode Academy Lab — node: k8s-lab", upstream KubeKosh
attribution left untouched in footer/README/LICENSE.
- RootNode curriculum mode: scenarios/rootnode-path.json (Foundation -> Workloads
-> Networking -> Configuration -> Troubleshooting -> Real Ops -> Capstone),
built from existing scenario content grouped by category, no new scenarios
invented. New GET /api/curriculum/path endpoint.
- Student roster + per-student progress: instructor-roster, pick-your-name login
(no password), students/environments-adjacent progress table migrated to a
(student_id, scenario_id) composite key so practice progress and exam sessions
are isolated per student instead of one global bucket. New /api/roster,
/api/login endpoints.
- scenarios/data/*.json: added isolation_type metadata (shared_namespace vs
ephemeral_cluster) from an audit of which scenarios execute cluster-scoped or
node-level commands. This was Tier-1-isolation groundwork that got superseded
same-day by the full-ephemeral-per-student architecture (see
docs/LAB_ARCHITECTURE.md) — the field is kept as descriptive metadata only,
per the note now in scenarios/SCHEMA.md. Not wasted: it's an accurate audit of
which scenarios touch cluster-scoped resources, useful independent of isolation
model.
- .gitignore added (node_modules/, frontend/dist/, *.db, /data/, .env) — none
existed before; without it, npm installs during testing would have landed in
a commit.
Known limitation still open: no frontend UI for any of this yet (login screen,
roster-add form, curriculum view) — API-only. No auth on the roster-add endpoint.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <[email protected]>
- Split `scenarios/scenarios.json` into individual JSON files under `scenarios/data/` named `<scenario-id>.json`
- Split `scenarios/bundles.json` into individual JSON files under `scenarios/bundles/` named `<bundle-id>.json`
- Updated `backend/server.js` to dynamically load scenario and bundle files from their respective directories
- Updated documentation in `scenarios/SCHEMA.md` and `README.md` to reflect the new repository layout and contributor workflow
Signed-off-by: Abhinav Sinha <[email protected]>
ced4568andClaude Sonnet 5